Flannery O'Connor - The Habit of Being

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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

Flannery O'Connor
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O'Connor
I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Flannery O'Connor
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Flannery O'Connor
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them — in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

Flannery O'Connor
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

Flannery O'Connor
I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

Flannery O'Connor
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

Flannery O'Connor
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Flannery O'Connor
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.

Flannery O'Connor
Time is very dangerous without a rigid routine. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.

Flannery O'Connor
I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

Flannery O'Connor
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O'Connor
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Flannery O'Connor
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Flannery O'Connor
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

Flannery O'Connor
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

Flannery O'Connor
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

Flannery O'Connor
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Flannery O'Connor
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

Flannery O'Connor
Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.

Flannery O'Connor
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

Flannery O'Connor
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Flannery O'Connor
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

Flannery O'Connor
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Flannery O'Connor